Alejandro González Iñárritu's film The Revenant (2015) follows the character of Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) through the beautiful and harsh South Dakota wilderness in the 1820s. Based on Michael Punke's 2002 novel as well as historical events, and co-written with Mark L. Smith, this film portrays the characteristic nineteenth century Western narrative in which European settlers struggle to live within the North American landscape. Glass acts as a sort of American figure common in literary works set on the North American frontier. However, this protagonist's actions are distinct from the other fictional American frontiersmen of other literary works and films. The famous bear-mauling scene in The Revenant – in which Glass is viciously attacked by a mother grizzly – signals to this distinction in his character. Not only does it signify Glass's need for physical healing, but it enables him to understand the damages of European-American colonialism to the environment around him. But the mother grizzly bear is not merely a symbolic representation of nature's resistance to colonialism. The animal is also an agential figure who chooses to attack Hugh Glass in the narrative. Through the bear's choice to take up a defensive posture, it also becomes a victim of colonialism. In The Revenant, the mother grizzly acts as a force that punishes Hugh Glass's complicity in American expansion. Rather than continue to hyper-focus on his struggle to survive, the bear scene is the catalytic moment through which the narrative structure of The Revenant becomes more attentive to the ecology of the South Dakota landscape.

After Glass and his fellow pelt traders escape an Arikara attack that occurs at the beginning of the narrative, the party finds themselves in a dense forest deep in indigenous territories yet to be exploited by colonization. Glass, being the archetypal frontier guide, scouts the area surrounding the remaining traders to secure a safe path back to Fort Kiowa before the pursuing Arikara catch up to the traders. As he wanders through the forest, he encounters a group of bear cubs and, before he can even react, a mother bear viciously attacks him. She drags Glass across the forest floor, shredding the flesh on his torso and back in the process. For a moment, his chances of survival look slim as he desperately fights back against the overpowering strength of the bear. After a while, he locates and loads his rifle while crawling around the forest floor in agony. Finally, after finding his rifle, he shoots the bear multiple times, eventually killing the powerful animal as it bears down on top of him. This violent sequence is uncomfortable for most viewers, and Glass should not have survived this encounter. Yet, his rifle – which, in other adaptations of this story, he prizes above human life itself – extends him a lifeline. He has cheated death with a weapon of destruction most associated with colonialism. Further, the mother grizzly’s tragic death defies the ecological hierarchy, configuring Glass and his rifle as invasive species that damage both human and more-than-human beings native to the South Dakota landscape. His miraculous survival and recovery, which takes the remainder of the film, leads him to a mild realization surrounding the horrors of westward expansion.

What is striking about this bear encounter is the similarity to events and themes in William Faulkner's story "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses. In fact, Iñárritu himself has claimed that Faulkner is one of his main storytelling inspirations ("Alejandro"). In this story, Faulkner addresses the mythic qualities of nature, and the ways in which humanity violates its relationship with it. The story follows Isaac McCaslin and his "ritualistic encounter[s] with Old Ben," the bear that the McCaslin men and friends hunt every year on their plot of land in the American South (Lewis 104). According to many in the hunting party, Old Ben is "the head bear" of the woods (Faulkner 190). According to John Lyndenberg, Old Ben serves as "the preternatural animal that symbolizes for them their relation to Nature and thus to life" (65). The men's hunt becomes a ritual where all feel compelled to challenge and revere Old Ben, their mythic god of the wilderness.

Similarly, the bear Hugh Glass encounters in the South Dakota forest appears out of the wilderness as an almost mythic representation of the natural world. In Faulkner's bear story, Melvin Backman argues the relationship that Isaac McCaslin has to Old Ben is tribe-like in that the bear embodies the role of "chief of the wilderness" (597). In the text, McCaslin undergoes a series of trials of initiation into the ways of the wilderness, and he "would have to win acceptance from the chief" (Backman 597). The only way to accomplish this feat is by rejecting symbols of civilization and thus "surrender himself completely to the wilderness" (Backman 597). For example, Isaac McCaslin sheds tools of "civilization" like his compass and instead navigates his way through the forests based upon his instinct and know-how alone. During his wilderness trials, McCaslin feels as though Old Ben is constantly observing him among the brush and trees of the dense forest (Faulkner 199). At one point, he even sights the bear: "it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him" (Faulkner 200). In the end, Isaac McCaslin's viewpoint drastically shifts, and he rejects the institutions of his father by refusing to inherit the land the McCaslin family "owns." As an old man, he refuses to repudiate the land that he is supposed to inherit from his family. He says, "[The land] was never mine to repudiate. It was never Father's and Uncle Buddy's to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never Grandfather's to bequeath" (Faulkner 245-246). After witnessing Old Ben in the woods, he realizes that taking ownership over land is an act of violation that is harmful to everyone involved. This revelation occurs after Old Ben is brutally killed by the hunters in a manner McCaslin finds utterly repulsive. He is disillusioned as he watches Old Ben suffer grave violence for the sport of it. In both narratives, the bear's death signifies a moment in which the powerful animal imparts its own ecological wisdom onto its human counterpart. In Faulkner's story, Isaac McCaslin is bestowed with this symbolic gift. In The Revenant film, Hugh Glass is given this knowledge despite also acting as the mother grizzly's murderer. Thus, in both narratives, the bear is only important insofar as it serves as the bestower of ecological wisdom. The bear is only important in its tragic death.

When both texts are read in ways that centralize the American male protagonist (or marginalize animal life to mere symbols), they fit within the long literary tradition that focuses on the civilization-wilderness dichotomy. McCaslin and Glass are both repulsed by what they perceive as civilization and instead turn to the frontier or wilderness as a place of vitality. Indeed, this move away from the modern or civilized world has long been perceived as a driving influence on white American cultural identity. As Henry Nash Smith claimed back in 1950, cultural thinkers like Frederick Jackson Turner "maintained that the West…was the most important among American sections, and that the novel attitudes and institutions produced by the frontier, especially through its encouragement of democracy, had been more significant than the imported European heritage in shaping American society" (3-4). William Cronon, of course, says that this idea is just the trouble with the wilderness. He argues that the notion of the frontier, that place Frederick Jackson Turner deems as so essential to American identity, is completely constructed (Cronon 14). More bluntly, Arthur Redding claims, "The myth of the frontier is simply a hoax" (321). Nonetheless, Annette Kolodny shows us that this wilderness-civilization dichotomy in colonial letters and literature is a primary metaphor for white American male experience even into the twentieth century, hoax or not (138). If we maintain our focus on the white male characters in The Revenant movie or even "The Bear," then both grizzlies serve as symbols that enable McCaslin and Glass to see through the veil of so-called civilization. Additionally, these readings place value on the environment insofar as it aids human characters in regenerating or redefining their own identity. The environment, the nonhuman life within it, and even the indigenous peoples who long claim the frontier as their home only matter in their relation to our white protagonists. Approaching The Revenant, "The Bear," and other frontier literatures from this perspective is still important. By doing so, we can analyze how the frontier myth persists into the present day or, conversely, how artists attempt to subvert or deconstruct this dichotomy that separates the wild from civilization. Yet, we miss out on so much else these texts might have to offer when we remain focused on characters like Hugh Glass. The nonhuman animals and the environment in which The Revenant is set deserve far more critical attention.

Therefore, I argue that it is not enough simply to look at the bear in The Revenant as a mere catalyst for Hugh Glass's transformation. Though Mario Ortiz-Robles convincingly claims that all literary animals serve human purposes, we still must look at the bear itself, and how it claims its own agency as a political figure even if it loses its life due to American expansion (2). The bear is more than a symbol or metaphor to be interpreted by critics and audience members. Yes, the mother bear can function in these ways, but it is also a living being within the narrative itself. Of course, to hearken back to Ortiz-Robles, all literary animals serve anthropocentric goals in any narrative, and the bear in The Revenant is no different (2). Hence, we must look at the nonhuman animal simultaneously as a being in relation to Glass and as a being in its own separate sphere of existence, insofar as we can. The bear certainly serves as a metaphor of change or punishment for Glass, but it is also "a material organism with its own agency" (Lönngren 43). To examine the bear in its own right, we must first revisit the mauling scene depicted in Iñárritu's and Smith's adaptation. Glass wanders about the underbrush of a lush forest alone when he suddenly encounters small bear cubs. The trapper lifts his rifle to his shoulder, aiming it towards the animals in front of him. As he does this, the silhouetted figure of a much larger bear appears behind him. Before he can rotate his rifle towards this shadow, a mother grizzly swiftly paws Glass to the forest floor. The mother defends her cubs from an invasive predator, choosing to appear out of the underbrush where she was formerly hidden.

The bear's very appearance at first seems to fit within the common American western frontier trope where the living beings in the frontier – both indigenous people and animals – exist simply to stifle the white man's progress. Writing on the film adaptation of The Revenant, Jack Rutherford claims that the violence of the bear and the Arikara attack at the beginning of the film moralizes Glass's quest for the settler-colonial advance inherent to the western genre (72). In other words, the bear attack is just another obstacle to the frontiersman. It centers the white protagonist while marginalizing indigenous people and the western frontier itself as a place of violence. While the bear certainly intrudes within the narrative simply to inflict violence, it is a defensive move. She is provoked by Glass's very placement in the forest. It is actually Glass who intrudes upon the grizzly bears, and he is also responsible for the real or at least more disturbing form of violence in this sequence. Much like other frontier hero narratives, "the bear represents aspects of the wilderness that are incompatible with Euro-American civilization" (Rutherford 72). As such, it must die. In the case of The Revenant, however, the very act of defeating the bear in combat is based upon reliance on a colonial machine: the rifle. Glass's choice to use the weapon in such a way does not embody the "heroic" often associated with the legendary frontier hero. On the contrary, it sheds light on the truth of this kind of narrative much in the same way Old Ben's death in "The Bear" undermines the sacred hunting story the McCaslin family appropriates. In both, the sheer destructive violence of the weapon reveals its exploitive nature. As Jack Rutherford and other critics accurately suggest, The Revenant still centers the white male frontiersman at the expense of the indigenous humans and animals in the South Dakota environment. Hugh Glass, or Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, still receives the greatest amount of screen time. Nonetheless, the bear mauling scene is pivotal as it adds dimensions to the oft-neglected reality of this figure and western narrative more broadly.

Most western narratives depict the human-nonhuman/animal struggle as something almost herculean. Take, for instance, the legend of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Both men were said to have killed bears in their lifetime while wandering the frontier. Indeed, a common legend of Crockett claims he dispatched his first bear at the age of three (see Cannon). To be a legend of the frontier, wrestling and defeating the apex North American land mammal seems to be a necessary rite of passage. The ingenious western hero must outwit the powerful animal in a struggle for supremacy over the landscape. Charles Waugh calls the ritualistic bear killings we see in American fiction "as a moment that defines some part of the national character" (25). Waugh suggests that the bear killing plot is a rhizomatic, nonlinear narrative trope that continually arises in American literature from early colonial days to the twenty-first century (25). He proves his point by looking at a few bear-killing texts, including Faulkner's "The Bear," Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, T.B. Thorpe's "The Big Bear of Arkansas," Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. According to Waugh, these texts "establish a tradition with real-life analogues and consequences that, in turn, point to important and problematic characteristics in American culture," which is also the case in the movie (25). Glass's ingenuity when facing his bear derives solely from his ability to discharge a rifle. Without it, he is doomed to death by mauling. No skill or physical feature can protect him from the might of the mother grizzly he fights. Glass is an intruder in her environment even if he knows it better than the average Anglo-American fur trapper. In the novel, Michael Punke also emphasizes the importance the Anstadt rifle to Glass's survival (24-25). It is his lifeline, and it must be used strategically to defeat the mother grizzly. So, rather than firing the weapon from a long distance, Glass lures the mother near his injured body before firing the rifle into the animal. This bait-and-switch move ultimately saves his life, but it is a cruel and almost exploitative action. In fact, his choice of combat is representative of North American settler colonialism generally, and the mother bear dies with a singular motive: to protect her own cubs from harm. Hence, the ritualistic bear killing we see in the movie and the novel, to follow Waugh's critical trajectory, points to the value of the rifle in American culture.

The weapon gives him advantage over the animal in a way that is ecologically unsettling. The rifle upends the ecological order of the South Dakota environment. The same is true of Faulkner's bear story. When the southern men finally corner Old Ben after years of hunting him, the bear's death is the antithesis to the expected climactic struggle between human and animal. In the text, the men corner the old bear with a pack of hounds led by the fiercely trained dog, Lion. As the dogs attempt to subdue Old Ben, one of the hunters named Boon charges the bear with a knife. In the carnage, most of the hounds including Lion die, Boon is severely injured, and Old Ben dies in a violently cruel fashion (Faulkner 230-231). In what should be a climactic struggle, the confrontation with Old Ben is tainted with cruelty and unwarranted violence. After the bear's death, we learn that there was really no reason to hunt the animal whatsoever. In fact, as I noted earlier, Isaac McCaslin is utterly disillusioned by his complicitly in the violence they inflict on Old Ben. Their prized hunting dog, Lion, suffers an unnecessary death, and Boon is haunted by his choice of action for the rest of his life (Faulkner 315). While both "The Bear" and The Revenant follow the traditional white American wilderness narrative, they also critique it in the culminating moment of violence. It is in this moment – when Glass dispatches the bear – that The Revenant begins to reveal the reality of the white man in the wilderness narrative as one based upon exploitation and domination. This is the primary difference between the bear's role in The Revenant and Faulkner's story. Faulkner's text shows us how civilization totally destroys a pristine American wilderness. The Revenant, on the other hand, shows us how Anglo-European colonialism upsets vibrant ecologies of human and more-than-human life in North America.

Along with the oft-neglected violence the indigenous people face in such narratives of western so-called "progress," animals face similar issues. From the opening shot of the film, we see pelts of beavers that European fur trappers carry along with them to ship back east. Inflicting violence on the animals and the indigenous peoples of the region, American and French Canadian trappers terrorize the landscape. In fact, Glass’s sole purpose for being out in the wilderness is to serve as a guide to the American trapping contingency. Early on, then, beavers and other animals are merely seen in "market-value-terms via capitalist networks" (Hanley 164). Beavers in particular are degraded to mere commodities as they are measured in terms of their exchange-value. By the end of the film, however, Jane Hanley points out that many of the animal encounters we see on screen become "individuated" (164). Rather than viewing animals as mere materials for economic purposes, the lives and deaths of animals become integral aspects to the survival of Hugh Glass himself. After swimming down an icy river, for example, Glass encounters a small pack of wolves preying on a buffalo that they were able to separate from a vast herd stampeding away from the riverbanks. Eager for any form of nourishment, Glass joins the wolfpack to devour some buffalo meat. He even fends off the wolves to get his own share of the deceased animal. Domesticated animals also become more individuated. In a frenzied flight away from pursuing Arikara, Glass accidentally rides his horse off a cliff. While he miraculously survives, his horse is not so lucky. Rather than simply departing from his fallen mount, Glass utilizes the carcass's warmth in the harsh cold by cutting it open and crawling inside. When he finally recovers his strength, he lingers over his dead horse, expressing a form of nonverbal gratitude for all the creature offered to keep him alive. These moments of individuation all occur after the brutal bear mauling scene. Before the bear, animals are seen only in their market capacity – pelts, furs, mounts, beasts of burden, etc. After the bear, animals take on a more central role in the structure of the film and for Glass himself.

At the beginning of the film, Arikara men on horseback simply appear out of the forest to inflict violence on Glass's party, something that Jack Rutherford suggests is a common trope in the western genre (72). After the bear scene, however, we learn their attack was an attempt to retrieve the kidnapped daughter of the Arikara chief. The Arikara mistake Glass's American trapping contingency for the French-Canadian trappers who do possess the Arikara woman and treat her with horrific brutality shown on screen. The Arikara violence we see in the film is simply, in the words of Cui Chen, "a reaction to the greater violence done to them by the settlers" (Chen 150). Though the bear mauling scene occurs early, it alters the trajectory of the film's perspective. It undoubtedly remains a white American in the wilderness story, but the realities for these kinds of stories to be told are more pronounced than in earlier renditions.

Since the mauling scene can be interpreted as the moment of change in The Revenant, the mother grizzly is a political animal. This powerful animal's intrusion in the film disrupts the common western plot in which the white American male traverses the frontier landscape as a beacon for settler colonial society. Though the mother becomes a victim of Glass, her loss of life alters the course of the film itself, which is vastly different from Michael Punke's novelistic adaptation of the Hugh Glass story. In the words of Jordan Savage: "Punke's novel is the story of an American hero conquering landscape, enemies, and grizzly bears to enact revenge. Iñárritu's version of the story is something quite different: he re-populates the emptied landscape with the type of characters who are historically un- or mis-represented – the Native American chief and, perhaps more importantly, his daughter" (5). Savage is correct in his reading of Iñárritu’s adaptation. I would add, however, that the film version of the story does not only populate the landscape with indigenous peoples. The wildlife of the region, from bear to beavers, is also reinscribed on screen in Iñárritu’s version.

Early narratives of Hugh Glass, like Punke’s novel, adhere to the paradigm Richard Slotkin lays out in Regeneration Through Violence. According to Slotkin, European colonists saw in America a chance to regenerate themselves and their fortunes, but such regeneration almost always took the form of violence. As such, "the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the [colonial] American experience" (Slotkin 5). Thus, what Jordan Savage calls "revenge" in the Punke version of the Hugh Glass story, I call "regeneration." In the Punke novel, Glass, injured by his near-death confrontation with a mother grizzly, hunts down his sworn enemy, John Fitzgerald, for stealing his beloved rifle. Hence, just like the Iñárritu adaptation, the grizzly scene in Punke's novel is also a catalytic moment even if it is for vastly different purposes. After capturing Fitzgerald, Glass brings him to justice through the American legal system. During the trial, however, Glass attempts to murder the thief in a courtroom, pulling a concealed pistol out of his coat and aiming it at the accused (238, 244). In this adaptation, which is perhaps more accurate to the historical event, guns are still perceived as an almost sacred device for white Americans in the frontier. The weapon is essentially their life. Indeed, the entire story revolves around Glass's desire for vengeance after Fitzgerald steals his beloved Anstadt rifle.

In Iñárritu’s film, however, Fitzgerald murders Glass's only son named Hawk (Forrext Goodluck) – a half-white, half-Pawnee adolescent – after Glass suffers his bear mauling. Punke's novel does not include any character by such a name. Jordan Savage argues that Hawk is a central figure in Iñárritu's adaptation because he represents "the symbol of a coming together of America's white and indigenous parental lines" (5). The fact that he does not survive the first act should show us that this "coming together" of colonial and indigenous peoples "has not, actually, been resolved in American history" (Savage 5). Fitzgerald's egregious act of violence serves as the motive for Glass's recovery and leads him to seek revenge outside of the courtroom for his son's death. In the film adaptation, Glass's motives for clinging to life and pursuing Fitzgerald are far great than the theft of any weapon. After finally locating Fitzgerald, the two wrestle in a violent struggle beside a frozen riverbank. Just as Glass is about to defeat Fitzgerald – just as he is about to achieve his "regeneration through violence" – he notices the very same Arikara men who were searching for their chief's daughter on the opposite bank of the river. In a quick moment of choice, Glass floats the incapacitated Fitzgerald across the river where the Arikara exact their own revenge on the man instead. Iñárritu’s choice to forego the bloody ending expected of a typical western movie, where the white hero slays the villain, subverts the typical "regeneration through violence" framework. The writer-director opts for a moment of deconstruction in which what viewers might expect from a traditional frontier narrative is totally upended.

Unlike previous adaptations of the Hugh Glass story, Iñárritu chose the bear attack scene as the pivotal moment of change in the standard western narrative. It is from this moment on that we see the realities of settler colonialism on the environment, on the animals, and on the indigenous peoples of South Dakota. In a sense, Hugh Glass does regenerate through his killing of the bear, but it is a regeneration of recognition. The gaze of the film itself begins to recognize the violence inherent in the colonial system. Thus, Glass is not the only character who is transformed by the bear attack. The entire film reorients itself around the ecological violence of settler colonialism. It becomes more attuned and attentive to the damaged South Dakota environment. Glass's ultimate choice to release Fitzgerald to the Arikara rather than satisfy his own vengeance suggests that the protagonist has changed in some way. Sina Movaghati argues that it is Glass's encounters with the Pawnee man named Hikuc that ultimately changes his perspective (687). After all, Hikuc offers Glass the mantra, "Revenge is in the Creator's hands" (The Revenant). This philosophy seems to carry great resonance for Glass at the end of the film when he withholds himself from killing Fitzgerald. Though Hikuc's role should not be downplayed, I assert that the bear attack scene is the catalyst that transforms Glass's outlook. Hikuc's role in actualizing Glass's change is certainly important, but the bear scene is where the momentum of the film first changes. But it is much more than that. Jane Hanley argues that The Revenant does not simply focus on the white masculinity of Hugh Glass but also draws attention to the haunting destruction that is to come with settler colonialism (160). Likewise, Cui Chen contends, "The film comes to haunt the viewer's present by revisiting images of the history of America's colonization in a way that creates ruptures in established historical narratives" (144).

Iñárritu's rendition of The Revenant highlights the continual violence that still haunts the North American continent and remains a part of the people and environment to this very day. The mother grizzly's appearance in the film is brief, but her tragic death is the first moment in which this reality is foregrounded. While the film still centralizes itself around a white male hero of the frontier like many Eurocentric narratives, it also examines depictions of violence and exploitation that are often neglected in stories such as this one.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Martin Griffin and Emily Johansen for first helping me develop this idea a few years ago. I also thank Jai Apate and my co-panelists who provided me with significant insights at ASLE 2023 in Portland, Oregon. Finally, I thank the editor and peer reviewers of Americana who have helped me turn this paper into the article it is today.